An illuminating investigation that will surprise general readers and aid scholars and students.
An impressively detailed, eye-opening study by film producer Saunders of the CIA’s clandestine sponsorship of artists and
intellectuals during the Cold War. Using interviews and archival data (taken mostly from sources outside the CIA, who routinely ignored her requests under the Freedom of Information Act), Saunders pieces together an elaborate network of CIA money-laundering schemes that funded cultural organizations opposed to communism. Starting with black accounts siphoned off from the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, Saunders details how the CIA created or used nonprofit organizations such as the Ford Foundation to funnel millions of dollars to institutions like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its affiliated programs. While few will be shocked that conservatives like Irving Kristol participated in CIA-backed projects, laymen will be surprised at how the Boston Symphony Orchestra and various abstract expressionist painters (via the Museum of Modern Art under Nelson Rockefeller, its president and an adviser to Eisenhower) benefitted from this largesse. At times the high volume of data and personalities muddies the story, and one would expect more cloak-and-dagger spy stories in such an exhaustive study, but thankfully Saunders does address the crucial issue her subject raises—namely, the consequences of intellectuals accepting money (consciously or unconsciously) from political sources. She pays considerable attention to old controversies, such as (CIA-backed) Encounter’s refusal to publish an article by its former editor Dwight Macdonald, and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s attack on the same journal for its disavowed but evident American boosterism. She can also make the CIA appear enlightened, as when she describes how the Ivy Leaguers of the Agency supported leftist artists over the objections of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the end, however, Saunders has little tolerance for state-sponsored thinkers. She concludes that when, in the late 1960s, the artists and writers involved in CIA projects began denying rumors of their patrons" background, they were (in words taken from an interview) "crummy liars."
An illuminating investigation that will surprise general readers and aid scholars and students.Pub Date: April 4, 2000
ISBN: 1-56584-596-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
